Andrew Lakoff is assistant professor of sociology and science studies at U.C.
San Diego. He is the author of a number of articles, including, with Stephen
Collier and Paul Rabinow, "Biosecurity: Proposal for an Anthropology of the
Contemporary," Anthropology Today, October 2004.

One evening the week after Hurricane Katrina struck, the intrepid television
correspondent Anderson Cooper was featured on the Charlie Rose show. Cooper was
still on the scene in New Orleans, the inundated city in the background and a
look of harried concern on his face. He told Rose that he had no intention of
returning to his comfortable life in New York City any time soon. Cooper had
been among the reporters to challenge official accounts that the situation was
under control, based on the contradiction between disturbing images on the
ground and government officials’ claims of a competent response effort. He
seemed shocked and dismayed by what he had seen in New Orleans, but was also
moved, even transformed by his role as witness to domestic catastrophe. He had
covered disasters in Somalia, Sri Lanka, he said, but never expected to see
images like these in the United States: widespread looting, hungry refugees,
corpses left on the street to decompose. Toward the end of the interview, Rose
asked him what he had learned from the event. Cooper paused, reflected for a
moment, and then answered: “we are not as ready as we can be.”

Insofar as the hurricane and its aftermath could be said to have a shared
moral, it is this: we are not prepared—whether for another major
natural disaster, a chemical/ biological attack, or some other type of
disastrous event. This lesson structures response to the hurricane in terms of
certain kinds of interventions and not others. And the basic elements of
possible response are already in place. This implies that the potential for
Katrina to be a politically transformative event may be limited; it is more
likely to intensify and redirect processes that are already underway. To see
this it is necessary to analyze the emergence and extension of “preparedness”
as a guiding framework for domestic security in the United States.

Preparedness names both an ethos and a set of techniques for reflecting
about and intervening in an uncertain, potentially catastrophic future.1
Unlike other issues potentially raised by Hurricane Katrina, such as racial
inequality, concentrated urban poverty, the social isolation of the elderly,
the short-sightedness of environmental planning on the Gulf Coast, or endemic
governmental corruption, the demand for preparedness is a matter that enjoys
widespread political agreement on the necessity of state-based intervention. In
other words, in the imperative of preparedness, we find a shared sense of what
“security” problems involve today. To be prepared is an injunction that must be
followed. What can be a source of dispute is not whether we need to be
prepared, but how to prepare and what we need to prepare
for.

Preparedness is not wholly new, but has assembled and redirected disparate
elements of already existing security apparatuses. I will focus here on its
relation to two types of collective or public security that have co-existed in
complementary and contradictory relation over the course of the last century:
“population security” and “nation-state security.” These two types of security
differ in their aims, objects, and in the forms of knowledge on which they
rely. I will suggest that some of the tensions we have seen in the response to
Katrina emerge from conflicting imperatives that are embedded in the techniques
that preparedness has adopted from these two other types of security.

Population security aims to foster the health and well-being of human beings
understood as members of a national population.2 Its mechanisms work to
collectivize individual risk—of illness, accident, infirmity, poverty. Through
calculation of the rates of such events across large populations over an
extended period, population security apparatuses find regularities—birth and
death rates, illness prevalence, patterns of consumption. They can then
intervene to increase and sustain life. Examples of mechanisms connected to
population security include: efforts to know and improve the public health; the
promotion of social welfare through means such as guaranteed pensions; the
construction of public works to improve urban hygiene; health and safety
regulations on industrial development or on the circulation of commodities; and
collective means of mitigating the risks presented by natural disasters. I will
say more below about this latter set of techniques, which are now a part of the
field of “emergency management.”

National security, in contrast, seeks to defend the territorial integrity of
a nation-state against outside enemies through military and other means.
Examples of efforts toward national security include: the military-industrial
system of weapons development and procurement; intelligence gathering and
threat assessment operations; economic aid programs designed to contain enemy
expansion; and civil defense systems oriented toward defending the industrial
and defense infrastructure in the event of an attack on the homeland. The
intersection of the legacy of Cold War era civil defense with the expanding
field of emergency management has provided the basis for many of the practices
now associated with “preparedness.”

U.S. civil defense programs were developed in response to the rise of novel
forms of warfare in the mid-twentieth century: first, air attacks on major
cities and industrial centers in World War II, and then the prospect of nuclear
attack during the Cold War. One key problem civil defense approached was: how
to maintain the nation’s war-fighting and post-war recuperation capacities even
in the face of a devastating attack? For civilian planners such as Herman Kahn,
this question was imperative, given U.S. military doctrine: in order for the
strategy of deterrence to work, the enemy had to be convinced that the U.S. was
prepared to engage in a full scale nuclear war and had thus made concrete plans
both for conducting such a war and for rebuilding in its aftermath.3 Kahn
invented a method for “thinking about the unthinkable” that would make such
planning possible: scenario development. Drawing up nuclear war scenarios and
playing them out as simulations helped generate knowledge of current
vulnerabilities in order to develop programs to mitigate them. The technique of
scenario development went on to have a prolific career in other areas concerned
with managing an uncertain future, such as corporate strategy, environmental
protection, and international public health.4

Simultaneously, and in proximity to local civil defense efforts, the field
of emergency management expanded in the 1960s and early 1970s in response to a
series of devastating natural disasters. Federally-based emergency management
had begun with efforts to systematize response to natural disasters, especially
floods and fires, in the 1930s. These programs included both mitigation efforts
such as levee construction and forest management, and recovery mechanisms such
as the declaration of federal disasters in order to release assistance funds.
In the 1970s, emergency management extended its purview to human-caused
disasters such as toxic spills, nuclear accidents, and refugee
crises.5

In contrast to civil defense, which operated according to the norms of
hierarchical command-and-control associated with national security, emergency
management had a distributed, decentralized structure. While its broader vision
was federally-coordinated, a good deal of planning efforts took place at state
and local levels, and involved loosely coupled relations among private sector,
state and philanthropic organizations.6 Despite these organizational
differences, civil defense and emergency management shared a similar field of
intervention: potential future catastrophes. Thus emergency planners borrowed
techniques for gauging and improving current readiness, such as scenarios and
simulations, from civil defense. However, there was often dispute over whether
locally-based emergency management programs should focus their planning efforts
more on nuclear war or on likely natural disasters. These tensions foreshadow
some of the issues raised in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, such as the role of
the military and the distribution of authority between federal and local
agencies in emergency situations.

In the aftermath of Katrina, it was common to see comparisons made between
the failed governmental response to the hurricane and the more successful
response to the attacks of 9/11. To an observer a decade before, it might have
been surprising that a natural disaster and a terrorist attack would be
considered part of the same problematic. And the image, three weeks after
Katrina, of George W. Bush flying to the Northern Command in Colorado—a
military installation designed for use in a national security crisis—to follow
the progress of Hurricane Rita as it hurtled toward Texas might have been even
more perplexing. To explain the seemingly intuitive association of these
disparate types of events under the aegis of security, it is useful to look at
the rationality through which civil defense and emergency management were
institutionally merged.

When FEMA was founded during the Carter administration, the new agency
consolidated federal emergency management and civil defense functions under the
rubric of “all-hazards planning.” All-hazards planning assumed that for the
purposes of emergency management, many kinds of catastrophes could be treated
in the same way: earthquakes, floods, industrial accidents, and enemy attacks
could be brought into the same operational space, given their common
characteristics. Needs such as early warning, the coordination of response by
multiple agencies, public communication to assuage panic, and the efficient
implementation of recovery processes were shared across these various sorts of
disaster. Thus all-hazards planning focused not on assessing specific threats,
but on building capabilities that could function across multiple threat
domains.

What was forged through the consolidation of multiple forms of disaster
planning under the all-hazards rubric was not only a set of techniques and
protocols, but also a shared ethos: the injunction to be prepared. The threats
that preparedness experts approach cannot necessarily be avoided: for such
events, it is “not a question of if, but when.” The point is to reduce current
vulnerabilities and put in place response measures that will keep a disastrous
event from veering into unmitigated catastrophe.

In the two and a half decades since the founding of FEMA, the agency has
faced ongoing tension between its natural disaster planning task and its civil
defense function. While Democratic presidents have tended to emphasize the
former, Republican administrations have focused on the latter.7 FEMA’s
assimilation into the Department of Homeland Security in the wake of 9/11 once
again shifted its orientation more toward civil defense—in this case, toward
preparation for a terrorist attack. Nonetheless, it is noteworthy that DHS
characterized its overall mission in the terms of “all-hazards” planning
familiar from emergency management. As Michael Chertoff said in 2005 in
unveiling the Department’s new “National Preparedness” Plan:

The Department of Homeland Security has sometimes been viewed as a
terrorist-fighting entity, but of course, we’re an all-hazards Department. Our
responsibilities include not only fighting the forces of terrorism, but also
fighting the forces of natural disasters.8

The National Preparedness Plan proposed a linked set of mechanisms to bring
disparate forms of threat into a common security field. These may be termed
“techniques of preparedness”: examples include detection and early warning
systems, simulation exercises, coordinated response plans, and metrics for the
assessment of the current state of readiness. In its Plan, DHS selected 15
disaster scenarios as “the foundation for a risk-based approach.” These
possible events—including an anthrax attack, a flu pandemic, a nuclear
detonation, and a major earthquake—were chosen on the basis of plausibility and
catastrophic scale. The detailed scenarios made it possible to generate
knowledge of current vulnerabilities and the capabilities needed to mitigate
them. Using the scenarios, DHS developed a menu of the critical tasks that
would have to be performed in various kinds of major events; these tasks, in
turn, were to be assigned to specific governmental and nongovernmental
agencies. Scenario 10 was “Natural Disaster—Major Hurricane.” 9

From the vantage of preparedness, the failed response to Hurricane Katrina
did not undercut the utility of “all-hazards” planning. Rather, it pointed to
problems of implementation and coordination. This suggests that in the
aftermath of the event, we are likely see the redirection and intensification
of already-developed preparedness techniques rather than a broad rethinking of
security questions. On the one hand, as official inquiries into the catastrophe
get under way, there will be continued struggles over how to attribute blame
for the failures in response. But along with this, there will be demands,
addressed to various agencies charged with security tasks, to enact reforms
that will improve our national preparedness. Such reforms will be primarily
technical: in the context of the Gulf, rebuild the flood protection
infrastructure; in large cities, improve evacuation plans; for preparedness
planning in general, ensure that there are coherent systems of communication
and coordination in crisis. More broadly, there will be scrutiny of the
relationship between Federal, local and state responsibility for dealing with
various aspects of disaster preparedness. Here it seems likely that reforms
will push towards an increased federalization—and militarization—of emergency
management.

In this process of attributing blame and coming up with technical reforms,
it is important not to lose sight of the larger questions that the hurricane
and its aftermath raise about the uses and meanings of “security” today. Here
it is worth noting some of the differences between the objects and aims of
population security and those of preparedness. In contrast to population
security-based tasks like public health provision and poverty relief,
preparedness is oriented to crisis situations and to localized sites of
disorder or disruption. These are typically events of short duration that
require urgent response.10 Their likelihood in a given place demands a
condition of readiness, rather than a long-term work of sustained intervention
into the welfare of the population. The object to be known and managed differs
as well: for preparedness the key site of vulnerability is not the health of a
population but rather the critical infrastructure that guarantees the
continuity of political and economic order. And while preparedness may
emphasize saving the lives of “victims” in moments of duress, it does not
consider the living conditions of human beings as members of a social
collectivity.

To consider Katrina a problem of preparedness rather than one of population
security is to focus political questions about the failure around a fairly
circumscribed set of issues. For the purposes of disaster planning, whose key
question is “are we prepared?” the poverty rate or the percentage of people
without health insurance are not salient indicators of readiness or of the
efficacy of response. Rather, preparedness emphasizes questions such as
hospital surge capacity, the coherence of evacuation plans, the condition of
the electrical grid, or ways of detecting the presence of e coli in
the water supply. From the vantage of preparedness, the conditions of existence
of members of the population are not a political problem. One task for critical
intervention in the coming months may be to keep attention focused on the role
such conditions played in turning Katrina from disaster into catastrophe.

Endnotes

2
Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the College de
France, 1975-76 (New York, 2003).

3
Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi, The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of
Thermonuclear War (Harvard, 2005).

4
The lesson of a successful simulation based on a scenario is typically the same
as the one that Cooper gleaned from Katrina: “we are not prepared.” However, it
is focused on experts and leaders, rather than the public. For an example from
international public health, see Laurie Garrett, The Coming Plague: Newly
Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance (New York, 1995).

7
Robert Ward, Gary Wamsley, Aaron Schroeder and David B. Robins, “Network
Organizational Development in the Public Sector: A Case Study of the Federal
Emergency Management Administration (FEMA),” Journal of the American
Society for Information Science 51 (11) (2000).